


Where The Beds Are Too Soft And The Chocolate Too Sweet

by Bouzingo



Series: Red Cashmere Sweater. [1]
Category: Marvel
Genre: Defection, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, MCU Timeline, Natasha is a teenager, PTSD, Recovery, Trans Male Character, the 1990s
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 23:02:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2043549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bouzingo/pseuds/Bouzingo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>At age fifteen, the Black Widow defects to SHIELD, exchanging information for safety. It's a trade that she shouldn't be making this early in life. Clint Barton has spared her life and now he is her keeper.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Where The Beds Are Too Soft And The Chocolate Too Sweet

They’re sitting in the observation room, watching SHIELD’s best psychologists work over what is ostensibly a fifteen year old child.

“I am suspending you,” Nick Fury says.

“Paid leave?” Clint Barton says, and grimaces at the glare he’s given. “Look Nick, I know this wasn’t the outcome you wanted…”

“It sure isn’t,” Fury says, lips tightening. “Because you developed a bleeding heart at a crucial moment, I have a teenage defector with a horrifying number of notches on her belt. I have a kid who’s trying to seek amnesty with us, though she has killed several of my agents in cold blood. I have a child psychologist who is breathing down my neck right now, because this kid is not all right. I wanted a dead enemy operative. Neater that way.”

“I can’t shoot a kid. If someone had told me that she was so young, I would have declined the mission,” Clint says.

“I would have told you if I had known,” Fury mutters. “As it was, we believed her to be more advanced in years than high school.”

“This is sick,” Clint says. “This whole thing. I’m sorry, Nick.”

“When this is less distressing, I will admit to you that you made the right call,” Nick sighs. “But I have a mountain of paperwork waiting on my desk for me to process, and I have not had a defector from the Russian Secret Service in literally a decade, so I’m having someone dig up the paperwork for that too.”

“What’s going to happen to her?”

“She’s staying here until the people who have no doubt been sent to kill her back off,” Nick says. “She’s going to exchange a certain amount of information for the security we can promise her. We have to determine that this isn’t a fake defection. And you have to talk to her.”

“What?” Clint says, but Nick Fury leaves, presumably to his paperwork.

\--

“You are not a man,” Code Name Black Widow says frankly. She hasn’t divulged her name yet, nor any information of real importance. All they know about her is the people she’s killed and the fact that she’s in danger from the people who utilized her services before.

Clint laughs easily. Misgendering as an alienation tactic stopped working on him the minute his acquaintances started doing it accidentally.

“It’s a common misconception, don’t worry,” he says. “I wasn’t assigned as a man at birth, but I can assure you that I am.”

The kid frowns. Her hair is greasy, knotted and maybe red underneath the grit. She fiddles with the hem of her shirt like any other teenager might in a stressful situation. It’s an obvious anxiety tell, and Clint could bet his bow that it’s being put on for his benefit.

“You must be hungry,” Clint says. Code Name Black Widow frowns deeper. “When I get home, I’m making risotto. Have you ever had it?”

She shakes her head, and Clint clucks sympathetically.

“Hard to keep track of the simple joys with our lifestyle. Good food is one of those things you gotta to hang on to for as long as you can,” he says. “What do you like to eat?”

“I eat what I am given,” the kid says. “You give me your rice dish and I will eat it.”

“Very good English,” Clint says. “When I was your age I had problems with Spanish in school. How many languages do you know?”

“Maybe five,” she says, looking down at the ground. “I think my French is gone. Language is like muscle. No exercise and you are weak.”

“That is very fair,” Clint says. A silence lapses.

“You didn’t kill me,” the child says. Clint feels like he’s been punched in the gut.

“No, I didn’t,” he nods. “I bet they told you that we would.”

“So I do not defect, they tell me many things,” she says. “Stories which scare others.”

“Why did you defect?” Clint asks.

The child falls silent at this and stares at the floor.

“My name is Natasha,” she finally says. “I will exchange certain amount of information for safety. Not that.”

“That’s all right, Natasha,” Clint says. “So you know, kid, I think you were very brave to do this.”

“I am coward,” Natasha says, but says no more until Clint leaves. She is visibly flagging.

“Terms of endearment, Barton?” the head psychologist, Jones, says. Pale, thin-faced and short, Clint doesn’t like this guy one bit. “Were you planning on keeping her as a pet?”

“Don’t be weird,” Clint says. “She’s a person and I’m too broke for her upkeep.”

“Damn right. The psychiatry bills alone would bankrupt most individuals,” Jones says, “and you’re still living in that shitty apartment over at…”

“Yeah, well we don’t all have cushy desk jobs,” Clint says. “She’s really not well, huh?”

“Never seen an operative with her degree of experience at her age,” Jones says. “This line of work fucks up people who are fully developed. I don’t even know where that’s going to go in the mind of a child.”

Natasha has fallen asleep, slumped over the interrogation room’s table. She looks so small and Clint feels sick. It nauseates him that anyone could have used a kid in this way. Fifteen year olds should be living relatively uncomplicated lives, not bartering state secrets for safety with stone expressions. Clint can only get through his own trauma because he believes that his was an extreme case, and rarely seen in other children. This is so much worse.

“Is this going to keep you up?” Jones asks. “Should I schedule another session?”

“Jones, you should know I wouldn’t willingly subject myself to your presence for any more than the three hours a week I have to,” Clint says with a wide smile. Jones nods understandingly.

\--

When Natasha asks, the woman who is watching over her says she can use hot water in the shower, and so she does. Days of grit and dirt come off her in the first few minutes, but she stays in for longer, soaping her hair and hissing when she presses against the bruises on her legs and chest. The towel Natasha uses to dry off is fluffy and purest white, like a hotel’s.

They’ve given Natasha a pair of jeans, a pair of shoes, socks and a plaid flannel shirt. It’s all set out in a nice pile on the chair outside the bathroom. The jeans say Levi on them and the shoes say Nike. She gets fixated on tying the laces on the shoes. The woman standing in the corner watches her impassively, though her eyes betray pity.

“Food will be brought up momentarily,” she says. “Did you want to watch anything on the television?”

Natasha looks at the television, shrugs. She doesn’t care. Her overseer puts on a colourful programme with lots of music and soon enough the food arrives. It is far richer than Natasha is used to, and there is far more of it than she thought there would be, but once she determines that it isn’t poisoned, she eats too fast anyway. She ignores the ache in her belly, because this time it means she ate too much, not too little.

There’s a knock on the door, and Nick Fury lets himself in. He does not look as intimidating as Natasha thought he would, but that is certainly part of this plan. They are treating her very well for now so she doesn’t regret defecting.

“Hello Natasha,” he says. Natasha determines he has no children, but maybe a few siblings. “How has your evening been?”

“I don’t like her,” Natasha says, jerking her head to her overseer. Fury laughs.

“Agent Moritz, you can leave us,” he says. The woman goes, and Fury turns to Natasha, who meets his gaze readily.

“If you have any more requests for your stay, now’s the time to make them,” he says.

“I want books,” Natasha says.

“Done.”

“And I want man with bow to be my overseer,” Natasha says. “I like him.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Nick says. “Barton is useful to me in the field. Will he be more useful here?”

“Yes,” Natasha says.

“To you or to me?”

“Both.”

Nick watches Natasha for a long moment. There is no pity in his eyes. This is reassuring.

“He’ll be reassigned tonight and he’ll start tomorrow,” he says. “Is that it? You don’t have requests for food or anything?”

“Different soap for my hair,” Natasha says. “I want flower smell. And I want to choose my clothes.”

“All right,” Nick says. “Agent Moritz will survey you for the night until Barton is briefed. You can deal with that right?”

Natasha nods. Fury leaves and is replaced by Agent Moritz. Natasha goes to bed soon after, changing into the night clothes that have been laid out for her. The bed is too soft for her. She takes a pillow and retires to the floor by the bed, where she falls asleep easily.

\--

“Hi,” Clint says. “I brought you some books.”

Natasha is sitting at the kitchenette table and eating her breakfast, oatmeal with fresh fruit on top. She’s clean of all the grit from the field now, and Clint can discern that her hair is indeed red. He sets the books down beside her and she pauses from her food to look at them.

“The one about the boy wizard,” she says, frowns. “This is for children.”

“Naw, I read it too,” Clint says.

Natasha considers him very seriously, and then looks at the other books. She reads the back of _Jurassic Park_ and actually smiles.

“You keep them as long as you need to,” Clint says. “I’ve read them all a bunch of times.”

Natasha looks at him warily again and nods. Clint sighs.

“Look, you asked for me to be here, and I want to help you. But you gotta talk,” he says. “I’m not psychic.”

Natasha frowns, and pops a blueberry in her mouth.

“And what will I talk to you about?” she asks tartly. Clint shrugs expansively. “They do not treat me so well so I can talk to you.”

“Then what do you want me here for?” Clint asks. Natasha twists her mouth and squints her eyes.

“I must have someone to watch me do nothing,” she says. “And I prefer you to someone I have not seen in battle.”

“Because you think you can take me?”

“Because you are capable of protecting me,” Natasha responds blankly. “Not Agent Moritz.”

“You don’t need to think about that anymore,” Clint says. “You’re safe.”

“I doubt that very much,” Natasha says. “Others were not safe when they defected. It was not because of any agency they went to. It was because of us. I killed defectors.”

 _Jesus_ , Clint thinks, swallowing when he thinks about this kid, younger even, being sent to kill someone that she might have worked with.

“You pity me,” Natasha murmurs.

“No, I just… you’ve been through hell, and I don’t think you realize,” Clint says. Natasha stares at him dully.

“I knew I had to leave to survive,” she says. “I am not stupid.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Clint says.

“You’re wrong to think that I am a child,” Natasha says. “I am a killer. Children are innocent.”

“You’ve never babysat, have you?” Clint says, but the joke goes over her head. “Look, I know a bit about what you did, and I know that you did what you had to so you could survive. No kid should be put in that position, but it happens. It happened to me and it happened to you. But you’re here now, and we’re going to protect you, like you should be. Because you’re still a kid.”

Clint doesn’t know how much more he should really be saying. He knows that there’s a child psychologist coming in whose specialty is child soldiers, and that the more Clint says, the more risk he runs of messing up Natasha even more. But this hurts, in ways that Clint hasn’t really resolved in himself. He’s compromised, and he wonders how wise it actually was to put the two of them in close quarters.

“You don’t know anything about me,” Natasha says, and her fists clench on the table, “if you think that I am like you.”

Clint doesn’t know what to say to that. Natasha glares at him, takes her bowl of cereal, which is mostly milk, and pours it on the Harry Potter book. She never breaks eye contact.

“I will not read this book,” she finally says.

“Read what you want to,” Clint says levelly. “There are other books.”

Natasha puts the bowl down, cocks her head in confusion. Clint raises his eyebrows.

“You ruined my book,” he says. “But I can get another one. Now I’m going to watch some television. You want to talk, I’ll be there.”

He leaves to the living room. Natasha doesn’t come out of the kitchenette until Agent Moritz opens the door and says that it’s time for her first session with the psychologist. She stands up, ramrod straight, and walks with the agent. Clint watches her go and goes back to the kitchenette to clean up the mess she made.

The milk has already been cleaned, to his surprise, and the ruined book is in the garbage bin. But _Jurassic Park_ has been opened.

\--

“How was her first session?” Clint asks Fury, who sighs.

“Terrible,” he says, and doesn’t elaborate. “How are you holding up?”

“I’m good,” Clint says, far too lightly.

“If you can’t handle this assignment, Barton, now would be the time to tell me,” Fury says with a raised eyebrow.

“I can handle it, I just don’t know if I’m the right person,” Clint admits.

“You’re probably the only person,” Fury says. “What we could take away from her session today is that it is important she surround herself with adults she can trust. The beginning and the end of that list appears to be you.”

Clint doesn’t know what to say to that. He can’t even think of what’s going to happen to this kid.

“So what, am I her guardian now, or?” he asks helplessly.

“You’re whatever she needs you to be,” Fury says. “A friend, a soldier, a parent. I don’t care. You have her trust, however tenuous that might be. Hold on to it, and figure out what’s going on with her.”

Clint nods and Fury seems satisfied.

“I don’t have children, Barton, neither sisters nor brothers,” he says. “But things like this happening to a child are unconscionable to me. Anything she needs, you tell me directly. You have all my support.”

“I will. Thank you sir,” Clint says.

“This might be good for you. A mission away from the field,” Fury says. Clint bristles at this.

“What do you mean,” he says. “If I’m getting benched because I finally came out then I want to know now.”

“That really isn’t what I mean,” Fury promises. “It’s better for all agents to have a break sooner or later. If I benched every agent who would have given me trouble with the World Security Council just by existing I would have a sham of an agency.”

“That’s reassuring to hear,” Clint says. “Thank you.”

\--

Natasha wakes up in the middle of the night choking on a scream, hand clutched around the knife she keeps under her pillow. The door is slightly ajar, and the man with the bow is standing just outside the frame.

“Hey,” he says, putting his hands up in surrender. “Hey, it’s okay. Haven’t got my arrows, see? I’m pretty useless without my arrows.”

Natasha puts the knife down, and tries to breathe. The dream had been terrible, only exacerbated by the doctor they’d made her see, who’d asked all the questions and treated her like a child.

“Can I come in?” Clint asks, as though he really needs her permission. She nods mutely, and he sits on the chair by the dresser. He doesn't ask why she and most of her bedding are on the floor. Instead he asks, “Where did you find the knife?”

“Agent Moritz,” Natasha says. “She didn’t notice when I took it.”

Her heart is still beating too fast, while images of too much blood and fire and digging a bullet out of her thigh while waiting for extraction race in her mind. Clint just sits there, and his presence is grounding while Natasha tries to shake the horror of her dream.

“Do you need anything? Hot chocolate?” Clint asks. Natasha looks at him.

“Won’t it melt, if it’s hot?” she says cautiously. Clint laughs like she told a joke, which only confuses her more, because she’s _serious_ and also she’s never told a joke in her life.

“Sorry,” he says when he realizes that she’s not joking. “I’ll show you. Come with me.”

Hot chocolate turns out to be a beverage instead of whatever Natasha was expecting. It is sweet, Westerners like everything far too sweet, but calming and altogether quite pleasant. Clint finishes his while Natasha is just halfway through.

“What were you dreaming about?” he asks, bringing his cup to the sink to wash. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“I am supposed to talk about such things with the doctor,” Natasha says. “Not you.”

“You can talk about them with anyone you like,” Clint says. A long silence passes. Natasha takes another drink of her hot chocolate.

“I had a mark,” she says, staring into the depths of her mug. “He was old, he was in a hospital in Krakow. I don’t know why they wanted me to kill him, when time would have done my job for me. I didn’t ask questions. I am… was the gun, and they pulled the trigger.”

The cold fear that had been somewhat numbed by the hot chocolate is coming back, and Natasha sets her hot chocolate down because her hands are shaking. Clint turns around from the sink and sits back down.

“I burned it down,” Natasha says. “I burned the hospital to the ground. The mark was well-protected and that was how I was ordered to complete the objective. I shot everybody who ran out. One of them shot back before I killed them. I couldn’t even see their face because of the flames.”

She takes a deep shaky breath. She can’t even bring herself to look at Clint, who thinks that she is someone worth protecting, who probably doesn’t think that anymore.

“My extraction took hours longer than it was supposed to,” she says. “That’s what I dreamed about. I dream about the smell and the blood and the flames. I dream about blood every night and nothing else.”

Clint doesn’t say anything for a while. Natasha’s throat is too closed up to even consider more hot chocolate.

“Did you tell this to the doctor?” Clint finally says.

“I told her I have bad dreams,” Natasha says. “And she made me draw them.”

“Do you want to try doing that now?”

“No,” Natasha says. “It is a stupid thing to do. The doctor is stupid.”

“What do you want to do?” Clint says. He is too patient, and it frustrates Natasha, though she doesn’t understand why.

“I want to go back to my bed. I want to be alone,” she says.

“Okay,” Clint says. “I’ll be out here if you need anything.”

Natasha gets up and silently goes to her room. It’s only when she’s in her bed that she realizes she brought her hot chocolate with her.


End file.
